


Tumblr Drabbles

by volatilehearted (anomalagous)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 19:52:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2321339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomalagous/pseuds/volatilehearted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of things I wrote and posted on Tumblr, posted here for posterity. They really run the gauntlet but most if not all of them have a super heavy Sciles theme because I'm a sucker for Sciles, so. Be warned. Skittles central.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You have no word to use to describe him. You’re not sure there  _is_ any such word, but if there is, you certainly don’t have it. If you ever did, your mind shredded it long ago, a sacrifice at the altar of being able to  _focus_  on  _something else_.

'Friend' stopped being sufficient in fourth grade, when your world was coming down brick by brick and your father was too busy trying to hold together to fraying pieces of his wife to realize how much it was  _tearing you apart_. It stopped being sufficient when he sat there through it all with you, when he let you cling to him in a tangle of limbs and tears and broken foundations. When he let you use the cellars of his heart to build a world around yourself.

 'Best friend' merely intensifies how woefully inadequate the word 'friend' is for how far he's gotten in under your skin, how closely his voice is wound around your bones like rebar. It paints in watercolor what should be vivid oil contrast the way he's never asked you to  _be_ anything other than what you  _are_ , how your essential core has always been,  _itself_ , what he was content to hold in both palms, without any desire to alter or repaint.

'Lover' never applied, not once, not even though you used to share kisses—lips-to-cheek covered in a powdered sugar sort of way—when you were so much smaller, when that wasn't a  _thing_  people read too much into, when happiness was allowed to be happiness and not something that had to fit into the box of someone else’s expectations. Not even though there was that one night, when you were on the verge of being sixteen, when you woke up in a cold sweat and some things that weren’t exactly sweat and wondered exactly when it was you started to wonder about the friction of his lopsided jaw on your stomach, when you decided that seed couldn’t germinate into a plant for fear it would choke out the whole garden and you pulled it out by its roots. You kept it in a terra cotta pot in the back of your mind and said  _nothing_.

There are no words for him, and to be honest you stopped trying to find them a long time ago, maybe even before you drug him into the woods to systematically ruin the rest of his life in the slowest, most painful bleed possible. Certainly not since then, since things have just gotten more complicated. He doesn’t  _need_  words, or labels, or descriptors of any sort. No one else needs to understand and you don’t need to define him outside of the unspoken pattern of communication between you, hands and eyebrows and coughed chuffs of laughing air and elbows in ribcages.

He’s just  _Scott_. It’s all he’s been, all he ever will be, all he  _needs_  to be.

All  _you_  need. Just  _Scott_.


	2. Chapter 2

There was a sleepover somewhere in the summer between fourth and fifth grade, after his mother had died but before he’d really dealt with it, where he and Scott had camped out in the Stilinskis’ back yard and called it an  _adventure_. It had been, in its own way, and it was probably the only kind of adventure Stiles could have  _handled_ at the time. With the tent set back from the house, it was almost like being in another world, some kind of world where he could have believed things could get  _better_  again.

Scott had brought, along with his sleeping bag and a backpack diligently packed as if they were going in search of the Northwest Passage, the biggest pillow Stiles had ever seen, legitimately as long as Scott was tall. It was fresh and fluffy and new like Scott had bought it  _just_  for this occasion, oddly lumpy in its deep navy pillowcase. Later in the night, when he and Scott were secreted away in the tent and Scott revealed all the  _lumps_  in the pillowcase to be smuggled candy and comic books, Stiles came to understand the _sheer genius_  of this enormous pillow. His father was good enough to pretend he didn’t hear the giggling sound of young boys hopped up on sugar and Captain America until the wee hours of the morning, and for the first time in a long time, Stiles felt like they’d  _conquered_ something.

The pillow became a central feature for the whole weekend. They split it lengthwise to lay on their backs under the stars, tops of their heads touching like they could pass thoughts crown to crown without a word, and drew their own constellations out of the worlds blinking back down at them. They burrowed in beneath it and lay back to back when the  _terrible monsters_  stalked around the tent, used it to build half a barrier around Stiles’ shaking form when the grief overwhelmed him and he found himself with his face buried against Scott’s shoulder and his voice crying for his mother. It was the bench they sat on, side-by-side, as the sheriff crouched over the fire pit he’d dug in the back yard, on the morning of the last day of ‘camping’, and showed the boys how to make ‘eggs in jail’, fixing Scott with a mock-stern look and a gentle correction when Scott suggested that  _his_  father had always called those ‘eggs in a hole’.

It was also forgotten at the Stilinskis’ house in the chaos of trying to pry the boys apart long enough for Scott’s mother to whisk him home. The Sheriff had only shrugged when Stiles drug it out of the tent later that evening and said that they’d just have to return it next time they saw Scott.

Yet somehow, despite the fact that Stiles and Scott saw each other more days of the week than they didn’t, the pillow never quite made it back into Scott’s possession. It stayed on Stiles’ bed, drug out of place for every sleepover but always replaced so that Stiles could fall asleep with one shoulder wedged under the top of the pillow and one leg draped over the bottom, the dark fabric of its oft-washed pillowcase and the  _idea_  of the scents of woodsmoke and sugar and _Scott_  pressed against his face. If anyone other than Stiles even remembered that the pillow was  _stolen goods_ , no one mentioned it, because if  _nothing else_ , it seemed to anchor the boy’s restless heart well enough to allow him some  _sleep_ , which had become a precious commodity indeed in the days after Claudia’s death.

Stiles grew larger and the pillow grew smaller, partly in illusion when confronted by the curiously long-limbed teenager that Stiles turned into and partly in reality, as it lost stuffing and robustness. Its seam split once after rough night and the distress Stiles felt was almost  _tangible_ , in a way he couldn’t articulate, pressing against his chest from the inside out like the oncoming train of a panic attack. It was all he could do to hold the feeling off long enough to scramble over his bed, locating every last tiny bit of fluff and cramming it back into the casing. It took twenty  _more_  minutes for him to calm down enough to stitch the rip back together. When his father asked what had happened with laughter, eying the imperfect repair job, Stiles pushed it away with a flushed, angry gust of ‘ _it’s fine_ ’.

It wasn’t until the Stilinskis left for a three-day weekend visiting (largely estranged, if they were honest) family and left the pillow behind that they realized how essential it was for Stiles’ peace of mind at night. He spent the whole weekend twitchy and sleepless, a useless wreck of sarcasm and sharp joints by the end of it, and there was a silent pact that stretched between Stiles and his father after that:  _the pillow goes everywhere._

Sheriff Stilinski wasn’t a stupid man. Stiles knew that—maybe more than anyone, more than all of those people  _outside_  of Beacon Hills who thought his father was  _incompetent_  rather than  _out of his league_. He knew if the pillow was anywhere in sight, if it were anywhere in his father’s memory, it would  _go with him_. It was _important_ , it was  _critical_  that the pillow didn’t  _go with him_. Once a strength and a comfort, now it was a weakness, a  _liability_. He’d considered destroying it, just to be sure.

In the end he couldn’t. Stiles had embedded too many memories into its now legitimately lumpy fabric, anchored himself down through too much of its ancient stuffing. In the end, all he could do was bury it in the very bottom of his closet and hope that worked.

It was the only plan he had.


	3. Chapter 3

They tell you, in hushed and concerned tones that still sound far too loud to your ears, that on the outside the disease can take between two and ten years to run its course.  _Sometimes_ , they tell you, a patient is lucky and has almost a full decade of reasonably normal function left before it all starts to fall apart.  _Sometimes_. You think to yourself that if this patient had been  _lucky_ , this—and so many _other_  things—would have never happened to him at all.

As it turns out, Stiles’ good run of bad luck continues. It’s less than two months from the diagnosis that he starts to show signs of the degeneration.

You try not to make a big deal about it, because you can tell, you can  _smell_  on him how scared he’s getting. You pick up the pieces and put them back where they’re supposed to be and you hope he doesn’t notice, because all you want, all you  _desperately_  want is for him to feel like things are back to  _normal_ , or whatever passes these days. You want him to be comfortable. You want him to be happy.

You realize it can  _never be_  the day that you find him standing in front of the parking lot of the high school, keys clutched in his white-knuckled hand, trembling so badly you can see the way his body shakes from feet away. When you come up to him, gripping his far shoulder with your fingers to try and give him a grounded place to focus on, he turns to face you with tears in his eyes and he tells you that he can’t remember which car is his.

You walk him to his Jeep and neither of you speaks on the way back to his home.

The summer is long, in a way that summers shouldn’t be. You should be spending hot afternoons at the community pool and late nights fighting over who gets to be player one on the X-Box, but what you _actually_  spend it doing is watching as the bright light that is your best friend, the one you might have once said could have never been quenched, grow smaller and more dim, like a candle at the end of its wick being drowned by its own melted wax. One of the nights he forgets that you aren’t dating and he reels you in so close, so tenderly, with such a drunken-happy smile on his face that you feel your chest clench up like it might seize or explode. He kisses you with his whole mouth and his whole heart and you know you should tell him no but you can’t,  _you can’t_ , you’re only grateful when he ends up falling asleep before he goes too far. Only heartbroken when he wakes up in the morning and shoves you off of the bed roughly, questioning in a voice that sounds more angry at  _himself_  than at  _you_ about  _what the fuck, dude, what’s with the spooning_?

Instead, you tumble through his window one afternoon because his father called you over and you couldn’t get in through the door, only to find him tearing the whole place apart. It takes you forty minutes to calm him down and another forty to realize that he’s lost his capacity to  _speak_. Neither of you know if it’s going to come back and you just hold him, face pressed against your chest as he sobs and doesn’t have to  _say_ what he  _can’t_  say: he’s terrified. You’re terrified too, but you try to hold it together, because he needs you to be the foundation while everything else crumbles away. You aren’t sure you can  _do_  it, but if there was anyone— _anyone_ —you could ever bear this pain for, it’s Stiles.

Three days later he can’t remember who you are, and his father admits him to the hospital for long-term care. It feels like the first step of the end of days. You stay in the room until your mother throws you out or you can’t  _stand_  it any more and then you run, you _run_  through the preserve, surrendering to your grief and your wolf and nothing else, because it’s far easier to be made up of those two things than to be  _Scott McCall_. Half of you is dying in little bits and pieces and the rest of you can’t be much concerned with anything else. Some of the time you ignore the rest of the pack, and you’re short and almost too-vicious with them when you don’t, and they forgive you or they don’t, but they don’t push. They seem to know any extra pressure and you’ll break.

He comes and goes through his own mind every time you visit. Sometimes, it’s like he’s almost  _well_ , and that’s almost worse than when he  _isn’t_ ; you’ve started mourning Stiles before he’s even dead and sometimes he  _knows_  that, he picks up on it and looks at you with such sad eyes and tells you that he wishes he wasn’t putting you through this. You try to tell him it isn’t so bad, but you know, you _know_  he knows first hand it’s a lie. You finally watch Star Wars with him, but he’s unconscious for half of it and interrupts another third with breathy screaming because he’s seeing things that aren’t _there_. You aren’t sure what you’re supposed to get out of the trilogy, but at the end of the last moment he turns to look at you and he’s  _there_ , just long enough to smile watery and look at your hands across your knees and to tell you  _thank you_. You know he means for more than just the movies, and all you can do is let your face collapse and shake your head like he never needed to thank you for a goddamn  _thing_.

The next morning he folds inwards into a coma.

You still come by every day and talk to him, even though he cannot hear you and even if he  _could_  there’d be no promise he’d know who you are. You read to him, thumbing through comic books and describing what Batman and Robin are doing on every page. You get to Jason Todd’s death unexpectedly as you jump around issues and titles and you break down into such terrible, ugly tears that your mother has to pull you out of the room and hold you for an hour until you can breathe again. The comic is ruined and you think maybe your heart is ruined too.

Focus becomes a fairweather friend; you can’t seem to think of anything but Stiles withering away inside of his own body. What was terseness with your family, your  _pack_  becomes outright hostility. You push and push and  _push_  against the bleeding edge, throwing yourself harder against something you can’t even identify, and finally,  _finally_ , two weeks into Stiles’ coma—

—You just  _snap_.

It’s laughably easy to break into the hospital. It’s a little less easy to detatch his pale, limp body from the medical equipment without any or all of the monitoring alarms going off, but you’re past the point of caring. It doesn’t matter.  _It doesn’t matter_. Sheriff Stilinski can come later and arrest you himself for all you care. You can’t sit there and do  _nothing_  but smell Stiles’ encroaching death any more. You have to try  _something_ , and even with your best friend’s fragile form cradled in your arms, you’re  _fast_. You’re too fast for them to catch. You run off into the preserve before they even get organized enough to know something’s wrong and somewhere in the chaos of the beeping and screaming alarms you think maybe— _maybe_ —you hear your Mom trying to buy you time even though she has no idea what you’re doing.

 _You_  barely have any idea what you’re doing.

When you  _get_  there, you realize this was where you were coming the whole time. It’s unassuming now that it’s been cut down, but there’s a part of you that looks at the enormous sprawl of the Nemeton’s stump and realize it must have been an impressive tree once upon a time. You can’t deny that the thing has put its roots into the core of your life, that your very existence and its are now irrevocably intertwined, and somehow—somehow this all makes sense, in the way a fever-dream you can’t quite get your conscious mind fully engaged in makes sense. You go with it, and  _going with it_  means playing Stiles’ body flat against the wood. You arrange him the best you can on his back, trying to cover as much dignity as you can cover with the hospital gown. You take a deep breath in and for a second you just  _wait_.

You’re not even sure what  _for_ ; some kind of flash of divine light, a miracle,  _something_. Whatever it is, it doesn’t happen, and you can feel the little spark of hope that had tried to light itself in your ribcage die. You want to scream. You want to  _roar_ , to  _demand_  that Stiles get  _up_ , get  _better_ , doesn’t he  _know_  he’s your  _pack_? Doesn’t he _know_  how essential he is?

Doesn’t he  _know_  that without him you’re just an animal?

You do nothing of these things. Instead, you fold yourself to sit cross-legged next to his still form on the Nemeton and pull one of his hands, intertwined with your own, into your lap. You close your eyes and you let yourself cry, silently but bitterly, and you hold your wolf at bay by digging the claws into the fleshy palm of your free hand. You have no idea how long you sit there, just you, and Stiles, your tears and your blood and your breath and the Nemeton.

The sun starts to rise and you begin to think, if you expanded your hearing a little, you might be able to sense the search parties closing in. You don’t let yourself think about them, or how angry they will be when they find what you have done. You focus on the feel of Stiles’ hand in yours, too-cool in the morning air, or the sheen of moisture on his pale face, which you aren’t sure whether it’s sweat or dew. You think of his laughter, locked away in your memory like you could never get it back, and you think of how  _wrong_  he looks, so still and so calm. You wonder if he is in pain and at the end of the wondering you reach out through his skin with your Alpha’s power and try to take it from him.

You don’t. Something strange happens instead.

You can  _feel_  it sing along your blood, screaming like a banshee in your veins—and you’d  _know_  what that scream  _feels_  like if anyone would. Something inside of you breaks free and you can feel your eyes flaring, your teeth lengthening— _God_ , no, get it back under control, the  _last_  thing you want is to be found like  _that_ , half-wolfed out and clinging to Stiles’ dying body, the  _last_  thing you want is for them to think you were going to  _hurt_  him. That free shard of you spirals down, spirals out, you try to grasp at it but you can’t get a grip, and you can feel, like you’ve just vomited up a diamond and pressed it into his hands, when it passes from  _you_ , out through your fingertips, into  _Stiles_.

One, three, five minutes pass, and after that moment it feels like nothing happened at all. That is, until you notice that Stiles’ color seems to be returning, mostly over his cheeks and knuckles and knees and the end of his nose. His heartbeat is louder, faster, stronger—it’s closer to its  _real rhymthm_ , closer to the song that means Stiles is close again. You find yourself watching his face with all the scrutiny werewolf powers can offer and trying not to laugh, to hiccup or scream at every time he twitches, his eyes flick under their lids, he scrunches his nose or moves his skull on the end of his neck like he’s trying to get comfortable. He never  _could_  seem to get comfortable in that body of his.

Eventually, his voice rumbles into raspy life, like he’s uncomfortable, and the hand he isn’t using to hold yours comes up. Stiles puts it against his throat and then strokes downwards, a gesture like he’s thirsty or maybe swallowed a bite just a  _little_  too big to swallow without pain. He sucks in a breath over his teeth, he pops his lips together, and then—

— _finally—_

 _—_ Stiles opens his  _eyes._

You freeze in place, more a rabbit than a wolf, and let him try to sort himself out. You desperately need to know if he  _can_. You watch his eyes trace over the treeline, narrow and widen and narrow again, and you recognize the calculations, you see that beloved puzzle-solver back behind the wheel as he  _recognizes_  where he is, puts together the  _why_  with the logical reason, and jerks his whole face to the side to  _look at you_. He really,  _really_   _ **looks**_ at you.

And it’s him. It’s  _him_ , it’s all of him, it’s every little bit you ever loved or found yourself frustrated with. It’s  _your Stiles_ , you’re so sure, you’re  _so sure_ , and now you’re frozen because you’re too overwhelmed to move, biting your lower lip into your mouth with the extremity of your emotion. You’re sure you’re crying, but that’s okay, because Stiles is too.

“ _ **Scott.**_ " He says, and your name in his mouth is like you’ve just been rescued after having spent a lifetime adrift at sea. "You  _dumbass_. Did you even bring me pants?”

You collapse over his chest because you can’t do anything else, burying your face against the rough hospital gown and his breastbone, and you laugh until you cry until you laugh again.


	4. Chapter 4

You can remember, with no small amount of  _bitter irony_ , watching _The Neverending Story_  once, as a child. You found it easy to identify with the protagonist, small and frail and socially awkward, a victim of frequent bullying with only his mind and a world of fantasy to retreat to. You remember the cold  _dread_  that held itself around your heart at the concept of  _The Nothing_ , haunted for  _years_ by the conversation between the Rock Biter and his friends:

> _**Near my home there used to be a beautiful lake, but then … then it was gone.  
> ** _ _Did the lake dry up?  
> _ _**No, it just wasn’t there anymore. Nothing was there anymore. Not even a dried up lake.  
> ** _ _A hole?  
> _ _**A hole would be something. No. It was N** _ __ **othing** **.**

It crept through your dreams, struck terror into the very core of you. _A hole would be something._  The idea that there could be an obliteration so complete, so  _thorough_ , that not even a  _hole_  would be left, because it left in its wake  _Nothing_ , and a hole would be _something_.

You wonder if it really started then, when you let the story inside of you, when you watched it over and over any day that you stayed home sick from school. You wonder, when you have the capacity for it, if you didn’t somehow also let the  _Nothing_  inside, allowed it to strip the boundary between what is  _real_  and what is  _not_  as so often happened in the film, and allowed it to seed somewhere deep in your mind.

 Sometimes it feels like that would almost make more sense.

At first, it’s almost easy to hide it. You’ve never been the  _best_  at lying but it comes naturally to you anyway; when faced with two paths diverging in the woods, you almost always pick the one that requires you to spin some kind of hastily, jaggedly-constructed falsehood to someone you love. You don’t know why that is, when it became easier for you to stack an unstable Jenga tower of lies on each other than to be brutally  _honest_ , and you have the resigned conviction that you’ll never know. It’s lost.

It’s lost, like a lot of other things are lost, like the right way to make the jump off of the edge of Rainbow Road that you’d _mastered_ , much to Scott’s annoyance, when you were eight. Like the name of the class pet you took home for a holiday weekend in fourth grade and forgot to feed, that you begged and pleaded your Dad to help you replace, and no one noticed the difference but you  _knew_ what you’d done. You can’t even remember what kind of  _animal_  it was. Was it a rabbit? A guinea pig? A  _lizard_?

It doesn’t matter.

The Nothing comes at night, or so it feels, and it leaves not-holes ( _a_ _ **hole**_ _would be_ _ **something**_ _)_ in your mind for when you wake. You forget your times tables and have to do the math manually in your head, you forget where to put your feet when you’re sneaking into Scott’s house to avoid the creaky boards in the floor, you forget the organizational system you and your father have used in the kitchen pantry for your entire high school career, but these are little things, _meaningless things,_ you’d happily sacrifice them if you could hold on to what’s important, and it’s as easy to blame their loss on a mind that was scattered like seeds to the wind on its  _best_  day. You take your Adderall and hope it brings focus, but all it brings is the tremors and eventually you decide it isn’t worth it.

No. That’s not true. Eventually you forget that it’s Adderall you _need_  to reel in the wild mustang of your mind.

You lose the memory of Lydia Martin stumbling out of the forest, haggered and dirty and  _utterly naked_ , and you can’t tell whether or not that upsets you, because once the Nothing takes it, it’s like it didn’t happen. You don’t even remember to miss it. It was never there.

It isn’t until you find yourself standing in the school parking lot, _knowing_  you must have a car because you’re  _at school_ , you’re  _at school with keys in your hands_  but utterly helpless to tell which one is  _yours_ , it isn’t until that moment that the bottom of the world drops out from under you. Scott’s hand on your shoulder feels like the Right Hand of Doom, and you can’t remember where you got that phrase from either.

You can’t bring yourself to talk on the ride home. You think of your mother’s face while you still can.

Scott, bless him, is Scott, faithful and worried and  _there_ , present for you in a way  _you_  aren’t. He holds you when you fall, he tries to nudge your memories back into place and often—too often—you’re willing to fake it, to smile and nod and murmur  _oh, yeah, I remember now_ , and sometimes you remember he can hear your lies in the thrum of your heart. He’s good enough never to say a thing about it. You forget that he’s a werewolf, what a werewolf even  _is_ , and after that you can’t figure out why sometimes he’ll turn his face away, hide his fingertips in his palms, and refuse to speak, only shuffling air in and out of his lungs noisily.

Halfway through the summer the hallucinations start. They’re always the same, and if there were enough pieces of you left to appreciate it, you’d find the bitter irony  _also_  in the fact that you can remember and acknowledge  _that_. The world tears itself apart around you, breaking into fragments that are dwindling ever smaller, and you can _feel_  it, you can feel the  _lack of it_  at your back. It’s coming for you, and you know you are running out of places to run.

The night you break down and kiss Scott, really  _kiss him_ , like you’re _dying_ , because you  _are_ , you haven’t actually forgotten anything at all. If anything, you’ve  _remembered_ , all too aware of how much you need him, how much you  _love_  him and how you’ve always  _loved him_. You know every inch of him and how that will be erased from you soon, and you’re  _weak_ , you lie, like you  _always_  lie, just to know you tasted him in your mouth once before you died. In the morning the decision seems like it was the worst cruelty, and you decide you can’t ask him to love you like that only to take it from him, and you choose the path of cowardice. You don’t talk about it.

Fate scoffs at your folly and takes your  _ability_  to talk about it for three days.

You wake up in a foreign room once the three days are over, words sharp on your tongue and the worried eyes of strangers peering down at you. They speak to you and you comprehend the language but you cannot understand  _them_ , they who claim to be your  _father_ , your _brother_ , who occupy no space in your mind or your heart. They bundle you up and take you to the hospital and you feel like your capacity to  _worry_  about that has been taken away too.

You are gone more than you’re here. You aren’t sure where you go, when you’re gone, but in a moment of rare clarity you remember speaking to someone about the sensation of drowning and you think maybe this is it, you just drown in your own head at the end of your time. Pain now, and Hell later. You can’t figure out why you’re worried about that; Hell has distorted to a collection of letters wholly without meaning or weight to you. There are other words like that. A lot of other words like that.  _Mother_.  _McCall_.  _Sheriff_. None of them make any sense. You sit up one night with a dark-eyed boy next to you, pretending you know him, thanking him for something that seems as fantastical to you as the movie you think you might have watched with him. It means something to him, you can tell, and you smile and think maybe this is just  _too much_ , floating between alien faces and making them all sad every time you see them. There’s no  _purpose_  in this.

You let go.

You become the Nothing.

You would float, if you were something that existed and that could float, but you aren’t, so you don’t. There isn’t even a Stiles-shaped hole where you used to be, because a  _Stiles_  is something, a  _hole_  is _something_  and you are Nothing. It expands in all directions. You were always Nothing.

Just.

Nothing.

Until suddenly there’s  _something_.

Nothing has no concept of time, so you aren’t sure how long it’s been by the time you become aware. Aware of yourself as a  _thing_ , as a  _something_ , as specifically a something that can  _feel_. Parts of you, whatever you  _are_ , feel hot, and others cold, and there’s a pressure like it might turn into pain that starts in one hand and radiates over your entire body. You wonder if you are being born. You wonder how you know what  _being born_  even is.

The Nothing distorts, it transmutes through the Philosopher’s Stone of your soul— _what’s a Philosopher’s Stone? What’s a soul?—_ and becomes something that could be better described as the  _greyness_. It isn’t  _Nothing_ , because grey is a color and a color is  _something_ , but for a long time, that’s all it is. A hazy mist film that covers everything, in all directions, all  _senses_ , somehow heard and felt and tasted as well as seen. You’ve just about come around to being _comfortable_  with the change, with the Greyness instead of the Nothing, when  _that_  changes  _too_.

The fog doesn’t lift but it does part like a weighted curtain around the form of a wolf.

You don’t even know how you know what a wolf  _is_ , but you’re certain that’s what you’re looking at. It’s a little short, for an average wolf, but it’s well-muscled, its fur a healthy sheen of dark black-brown. It moves with caution and confidence and its eyes shine a brilliant  _red_  in the mist around you both. Now it is the Greyness and the Redness and You and the Wolf.

It turns, looking over its shoulder at you, and starts to disappear into the veil. You are suddenly so desperate not to be  _alone_  that you scramble to your feet and start to run after it.

This feels familiar, somehow, in a place where familiarity wasn’t a _concept_  in what seems like far too short a time ago. The more you run, the more you stretch and remember what  _shape_  a Stiles is supposed to be—that’s  _right_ , that’s  _you_ , you’re a Stiles, you’re  _the_ Stiles, the only one, like  _Tigger_  but with substantially less orange and black stripes or bouncy tail—the more you become convinced of two things. One, you’ve never actually seen this wolf before in your entire life. Two, you need to be near it. You  _need_  to be with it, with a yearning that borders on  _burning_ , a desperation that feels life-threatening. Whatever that wolf is, it might as well be a  _part of you_ and you’re missing so many pieces you aren’t going to let it get out of your sight. You follow and follow and  _follow_ , running for what feels like forever, but the wolf never quite lets itself get out of your sight. By the time it’s lead you to your destination, the fire of pain has dug its way deep into your limbs. You don’t mind too much, because pain is  _something_ , it isn’t  _Nothing_ , and you’d rather have _anything_  than  _Nothing_.

The wolf leads you to a tree. There’s no ground for it to grow out of or sky for it to grow towards, but here it is anyway, impossibly large, impossibly wide. It  _feels_  of power, a feeling so strong it’s almost a scent or a flavor, its wood dark and brown-grey, its leaves broad and flat and green. It feels  _dangerous_  but it also feels like _home_  and you find yourself drawn towards it, like maybe  _always_  the things that feel best to you are also a little  _dangerous_. One hand reaches out for the rough bark, long fingers stretching, and as you let the other hand dangle free at your side, the wolf comes up next to you to place the crown of its head beneath your palm.

You make contact with both things simultaneously, and it completes the circuit.

It  _hurts_ , dear  _God_  does it hurt. You want to scream but you can’t find the composure to do it. One lightning strike that runs down one arm, across your heart, and into the other, and your whole world reorients. It goes dark but you feel like you  _should_  be able to light your own path with the sparks now in your veins. Something has changed inside of you.

You’re laying down, you realize, cold because you’re largely  _naked_ but for the  _completely insubstantial_  hospital gown that covers your front half from shoulder to mid-thigh. You’re covered in sweat and covered in dew and you can hear the world waking up around you, smell loam and wood and rotting leaves. You’re in the forest, you realize. You’re in the P _reserve_ , you realize.

You know what the Preserve  _is_ , you realize.

The next ten minutes of waking are a domino reaction of all the things you  _realize_ , all the pieces sliding back into place. You feel like you’ve swallowed something you shouldn’t have been able to get down your throat, rattled and stretched-out and misshapen, and you lift one hand to rub it down your neck against the feeling. Your mind snaps back into place like a Lego set, once dismantled but never  _destroyed_ , and as you feel yourself plug back into your body, you  _also_  realize that you’re laying on the Nemeton.You can feel its power under your skin, having molded and changed you into something new, something you can’t identify yet—and you can feel _someone else’s_  power inside you as well.

The power of someone  _achingly_  familiar. You tighten the fingers of your right hand on reflex and find he is already there.

You open your eyes, look over the treetops for the space of a few breaths because you’re afraid that if you rush this, it will fall apart. When the memories don’t slip from your grasp, you turn your face to the side and there—

—there’s  _ **Scott**_ , bless him, faithful and worried and  _there,_ present for you even when you  _weren’t_ , anymore. You can’t quite help the smile that tries to work over your face. You want to tell him that you remember, you remember  _everything_ , you remember his asthma attacks and the night he was bitten and the day he came to your house in snotty tears trying to stammer out that his parents were getting a divorce. You want to tell him how you remember that he snores but only if he’s laying on his left side, and how he always taps his soda cans exactly three times before opening them. You want to tell him that you love him. What you actually say comes out much differently than you expected, but that’s okay, because  _that’s_ always been you, too. “ _ **Scott.**_ You  _dumbass_. Did you even bring me pants?”

He makes a sound that is both laughing and crying and drapes himself over you and in that moment, then and no moment before it, you are  _yourself_  again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: Discussed/Attempted Suicide.

That was the  _thing_  about his best friend; he was rock solid but he wasn’t immune to the weather. There’d been a lot of weather lately. A lot of it had been Stiles himself, the hurricane of the beast inside of him that scratched away at the surface of Scott’s immutable self. Every death had taken a piece of him away, and although there was a lot of Scott to go around— _not like that—_ Stiles was very familiar with everything that Scott  _was_. He saw the weight in the line of his best friend’s shoulders. He saw it in the pause before Scott’s eyes would come into focus. He heard it in the quietude of Scott’s voice when he spoke about certain things. He knew it, the canker worm that was crawling into the flower of Scott’s heart. Sometimes he was certain it had come from his own.

The  _thing_  was, that  _thing_  he’d observed, it was a  _thing_ he would have never thought would have gotten  _this far_. It was too far in either direction. He’d thought they were  _past_  it, or would never come to it—Stiles wasn’t sure which. Either way, clearly he was wrong.

 Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been standing in Scott’s room, both hands up and pressing against the air, watching Scott bleed through how many holes in his stomach that Stiles couldn’t count, watching him press a  _gun_ , where in God’s name did he get a  _gun_ , to the side of his temple like his brown skin and the cold metal had any right getting so  _cozy_ with each other. The whole world was spinning.  _No_. Stiles’ whole world was trying to  _end itself_ , and he couldn’t even really rightly say he had no idea where this came from because it had happened before. Not often, never often, but  _enough_.

"Scott," he tested the temperature of the air with his voice, found it cold enough to make the word tremble on the way out. The wounds he could see through Scott’s ruined shirt were flowing black. Stiles was pretty sure that they were claw marks. He was pretty sure Scott had done it to  _himself_. “Scott…what—what are you doing?  _What are you doing?_ ”

The alpha shook his head, and that was almost too much right there; Stiles couldn’t decide if he needed to keep his eyes on Scott’s as he crept closer, or that trigger finger, wrapped inside the trigger guard. He glanced to the safety. Maybe Scott had—no. He had his bases covered. The gun was live. Could a werewolf survive a direct gunshot to the head? It wasn’t a question Stiles wanted to find the answer to with his  _best friend’s_  brain matter as the proving ground. “I can’t do it, Stiles. I can’t. I thought maybe it would get easier, but every time we lose someone, it just gets worse. I keep making things worse. I’m so  _tired_ —”

Stiles sidled a step forward, interrupting, throat tight around his inclination to tears. “No, Scott, no, this isn’t…this isn’t you.” He knew that was a lie, in its own way. He needed it to  _not be_ , like maybe  _saying it_  could make it true. “You’re the strongest guy I know. You’ve saved so many people. Come on, just put the gun down, dude, let’s talk about this.” How had he let it get to a point that he was back in this place, having to talk Scott down from the ledge again? It was deja-vu of all the worst flavors. It glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

"I thought it through, Stiles. I didn’t want you to have to see this. But this is the way it’s got to be." The world slowed to a crawl— _bullet time_ , his brain helpfully and bitterly supplied, full of irony and fear—and just the tensing of Scott’s arm was enough to send Stiles over the edge.

Stiles leapt forward, hands reaching for the gun arm. Scott’s blazing red eyes closed and his finger squeezed around the trigger. The pistol gave a jerk and coughed thunder and flame, blowing out Stiles’ eardrums from proximity, dazzling his eyes with the muzzle flash in the dark room. Senses blinded, he felt his body go crashing into Scott’s and they both went over backwards, Scott onto his back and Stiles on top of him. Hot, thick blood immediately started to seep through his shirt where Stiles was pressed against his friend and he shuddered at the feel of it. At the thought of what it could  _mean_.

His vision cleared and Stiles could see with a clenching rush of relief that where-ever the bullet had gone, it had  _not_  gone into Scott. The alpha was still fumbling with the weapon and Stiles lurched upwards, hammering both hands down against the delicate part of Scott’s wrist until he released the grip of the pistol. Stiles caught Scott’s face with one elbow in the course of lashing out with his hand to knock the gun out of reach, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to care. Instead, he ended up straddling Scott’s chest, fingers digging into his friend’s shoulders like he could wrap them around Scott’s collarbones and shake sense back into him with that anchoring point as his grip. His voice was more frantic and angry than he’d expected. “Let it heal!”

Scott made gasping noise, not unlike the sort of noises things made when they were about to die, rolling his head against the ground. His fingers continued to open and close against the air. “No…Stiles. No. It’ll be okay. Just let it go. This will be better. You’ll see.”

Pain flared in Stiles’ chest, just below his ribcage. It went supernova in the space of three heartbeats, and for a second, he thought he might be headed for a panic attack. No, it simply transmuted anything he wanted to say into an almost senseless roar, his face hot and tears hotter and  _God_ , how could Scott even _think_  this way after all of this time?  _How could they be here?_  “LET IT HEAL, DAMN YOU!”

He wanted to slap the werewolf until the animal in him rose up to protect itself. He wanted— _anything_. Anything that would jar Scott out of whatever terrible tailspin he’d been in,  _anything_  that would help him do what he clearly should have done weeks ago. The expression on Scott’s face, so lost and distant and almost  _content_  with that, tore at him until he felt that his  _inside_  was in about the same shape as Scott’s  _outside._ Bloodied and blackened and wrong. “It’ll be okay, Stiles.”

“ _No_. No it won’t. It won’t. Not without you. Goddammit, Scott, I told you before. I  _meant_  it, why didn’t you think…why did you think I was lying then? I’ve meant it every time, I’ll always mean it, I  _need_  you. I can’t…I can’t do…Scott.  _Scott_.” He could tell the tactic wasn’t going to work, that the alpha had already convinced himself of his own worthlessness. Stiles had to change tacts. He wasn’t sure if it was luck or pity that meant this train of thought was just as truthful as the last. “Come on. Do you want…do you want  _me_  to die?”

Something stuttered in Scott’s expression and for the first time he really  _looked_ at Stiles, meeting the human’s eyes and trying to search them for something that was already reflected in Scott’s gaze. “ _What_? No—no! I don’t want you do die, that’s exactly why I have to  _do_  this. So you don’t die.”

Stiles’ fingers clenched against Scott’s skin, and he shook his head, incredulous bubbling a laugh up out of his chest.  _Really, Scott?_ "No. No, no, no, you know me better than that. Tell me you don’t. I can’t…I can’t do this without you. I never could. Never will be able to. I know that, even if you’ve forgotten it. If you leave…if this is how you go, what do you think I’m gonna do? I’m gonna go find that gun and I’m gonna do exactly what you wanted to do with it, except there’s not gonna be anyone to talk me out of it and there’s not gonna be any wolfy powers to save me if I’m lucky. It’ll just be blood, blood, _so much blood_ , and me coming after you in the afterlife, so pissed, like you wouldn’t  _believe_ , but Scott, I’m not gonna let you face that alone—”

"Stiles, you can’t do that, you can’t just—"

"Oh,  _yeah_ , but you can? Shut up, you fucking hypocrite, and  _tell me_  you think I wouldn’t do it. Look me in the eyes and tell me.”

And Scott did. He looked Stiles in the eyes, he looked hard and deep and Stiles opened himself to the gaze, like he could show Scott every wild inch of him and the hard-edged  _determination_  that bound his bones. He’d  _do_  it. He’d be so hard on Scott’s heels into death that St. Peter would have a hard time sorting out which one of them won the race. It was a truth so true that it went beyond _veritas_  and just  _was_.

The tension ran out of Scott all at once, like water out of the bottom of a broken bottle. He gave a gasp which twisted into a sob at the end of the sound, and slumped against the ground, the hand that he had left stretched out towards the pistol coming around instead to curl around Stiles’ wrist. He began to pant in a way Stiles estimated meant Scott was in a lot of  _pain_ , and not for the first time Stiles wished that the fox had at least left him with the ability to pull agony out of the skin of another. It was a mercy that as beyond Stiles’ reach as the moon.

Instead, he directed his attention elsewhere, hiking up Scott’s shirt to watch his torn abdomen with frantically focused eyes. Finally, bit by  _literally_  bloody bit, Stiles came to the conclusion that Scott  _was_  letting himself heal. The wounds of his body would mend. The wounds of the  _mind_ , on the other hand—a ragged little hiccup tore its way out of his throat, and Stiles bent forward to press his forehead against his friend’s. “You can’t keep doing this to me, man.”

"I don’t…I didn’t know what else to do. It’s just so  _much_ , Stiles. I’m so tired of watching people die. I can’t keep going knowing I’m not strong enough.”

"So you let me help you be strong, you moron. You let me  _help_. Wherever you go, I follow, it’s been that way since we were like…four. Even into death. So, you know. Don’t go somewhere you don’t want me to follow you, because I will _find_ a way and trust that  _my way_  will probably be the most ridiculous one possible.” Dimly, Stiles came aware of the tears that had smeared their way down his face. He wasn’t sure when he’d started crying.

Scott’s voice laughed, anemic and bitter but it was a laugh. It was a start. Stiles would take what he could get. “You’re nuts, you know that?”

"Yeah? Well. I happen to know you’re a huge fan of trail mix, so  _that’s just fine_.”


	6. Chapter 6

It was almost sinfully easy to disconnect and drift on the tides inside of his mind. He’d spent so long struggling against the currents—so many, so quick, so quick to  _change_ , like trying to tread water at the mouth of Charybdis—that he’d never quite reasoned out how easy it would be to just let himself get kicked around, washed up and dashed against the rocks and drug under and spat out again.

It all really came down to caring about whether he drowned.

He had, once. He’d cared  _passionately_ , viciously even, with a tenacity only young, wild things were capable of. He’d been one of  _those_ , too, once. A wild, young thing, full of too much energy for his long-limbed body to contain. Now there was too much body and not enough soul;  _something else_ had broken down the door and made room for itself from the rafters downwards, leaving him far too accustomed to occupying the space beneath the stairs. He’d come free of his moorings and lost the boat and he was sinking, down,  _down_ , down. It was easier that way.

After all, he’d spent so much time fighting and now he was just so  _tired_ ,  _too_ tired. He never slept and he could feel the exhaustion deep in his bones any time he tried to move them. It was easier not to move them at all. He could elect for stillness, finally, drop into the deep hollow of his own existence. One day he would reach the bottom and the silt would settle in over him and that would be it. That would be it, that would be the  _easiest thing_.

He’d never really  _gone in_  for the easiest thing.

The warmth spread through him, a palm’s width across and radiant, and suddenly there was something other than the tepid bliss of  _letting go_  in the archways of his heart. There’s a deep and sonorous nope, calling downwards and vibrating through him, reaching around him to lift him up. Light cutting in from above, like a lighthouse in the fog, and abruptly Stiles needed to  _reach it,_ to come up for air. He became aware of burning in his lungs, his pulse picking up in his chest and then his throat, a hundred little flickers of  _having a body_ and  _filling it out_  as he rose up out of the blue. Drowning was never an option when that distant siren’s voice pulled him out of the  _deepdark_.

Stiles came back to himself with a full-body jerk as if he’d been slapped. For a moment, it was almost too much,  _light_  and  _warmth_  and  _noise_  and  _life_ , the sunshine-bright heat narrowed down to a hand on his back, and Stiles blinked, rolled his eyes until they’d agree to work and focus and synergize with his restless spirit once more. His field of vision was filled with a face that resolved itself into  _Scott_ , leaning around Stiles’ shoulder with his hand starting to work up and down the human’s spine in a gesture of comfort. The other was making skin-to-skin contact with Stiles’ knob-jointed wrist and he knew that the alpha was searching his body for pain to remove. His eyes were full of concern, face tipped down a little as he met and attempted to hold Stiles’ stuttering gaze. “Hey. Hey, you with me, man?”

Forcing air out of his lungs and then back into them, he worked his tongue like a turncrank in his mouth until his mind agreed to engage. “…yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I’m…I’m here. I’m okay.”

"Are you sure?"

It was so easy to disconnect and drift, but Stiles, looking into the raw honesty of Scott’s concern, the fondness in his dark eyes that couldn’t be masked, Stiles knew that drowning could never be as effortlessly second-nature as letting Scott hold him above the water.

"Yeah. I’m sure."


	7. Chapter 7

“Dude, sweet  _castle_  tat!”

That was it. That was the only sentence Stiles needed to hear, full of drunken good nature, from across the barbeque to know his  _minutes were numbered_. His time was finite. It was inevitable, now, no matter how thoroughly he tried to hide himself in the bowels of a party that he hadn’t even really wanted to  _go_  to, that he’d be hunted through the crowd, tracked down like prey, and pinned into a conversation he’d had  _so many times_ , a conversation he wished he could  _stop having, Jesus, for the love of God can we stop talking about it, please_.

Becoming an alpha werewolf had impacted Scott’s life in countless ways, transforming it as surely as his body. Some of those impacts were enormous, like craters on the moon, but some of them were relatively miniscule, like the way that Scott would find any excuse to take his shirt off. A poolside barbeque where people were _expected_  to wear the least amount possible was a perfect chance for Scott to show off, or to indulge his inner nudist or do whatever it was that made his little wolfy heart so happy about having  _no freaking shirt on_.

Stiles could hear Scott’s pleased laughter float by, and he stood on his toes a little to find him.

He wasn’t hard to find. Near the pool with a Corona in hand, Scott was all sunshine to rival the actual sun, engaging the small group of people which had surrounded him. A leggy blonde in a star-spangled bikini had taken the liberty of reaching out to pass her fingertips over the pectoral which  _held_  the previously commented-on tattoo, and Stiles felt something bitter and green take root in his heart. He found himself hyperfocusing on what parts of the conversation he could hear as he started to eel his way through the crowd towards the wayward alpha.

“I like the frost theme,” The girl was saying, her voice thick and obsequious with a tone Stiles had learned to identify, mostly from people talking  _at Scott_ , as the tone of a girl who  _really_  wanted to jump all over that D, “And the little heart in the center is precious, but don’t you think the text kind of kills it? ‘Cool Castle’?”

Scott’s voice is as deeply amused as it ever is, his side of the conversation thoroughly rote. He looks down at the fingers on his chest without refusing the touch. “That’s actually my Soulmark.”

Stiles was close enough at this point to see the girl’s fingers recoil like she’d been burned, and satisfaction replaced the ugly burr in his chest. He slid up quietly to occupy the space beside Scott as the girl asked, puzzled, “But you’re so young, how long have you  _had_  that?”

“Four years.”

“You’ve had it for four years?”

“No, no, I was four years old when it showed up.”

That’s the line that always floors them, and Stiles thinks Scott likes the one-two punch of setting ‘em up to knock ‘em down with his casual honesty. Stiles’ fingers began to itch, knowing his part in this little show was looming on the horizon, and he flickered them along the ends of his hands before reaching out to steal the beer from Scott’s hand. Scott let it go without even glancing up.

The blonde was barely showing Stiles any attention whatsoever, too busy blinking at Scott in some unflattering combination of confusion and stupefication. Stiles supposed it was possible this was her natural expression, but he was trying to turn over a new leaf since starting college, a leaf that was meant to give other people  _a chance_ before Stiles developed a terrible opinion of them. The leaf had been mostly Scott’s idea.

“You met your Soulmate when you were four years old? Wow. I…I’ve never even  _heard_  of that. That’s ridiculously young. Did it take you long to figure out who she was?” Now the woman was standing half on her toes, eyes scanning the party like she was looking for some kind of rival she could eliminate in the hopes of taking up the place on Scott’s arm. Stiles wondered if somewhere, this girl already sported a Soulmark with its letters struck through, invalidated but never erased. Like his father’s.

There was no chance for his mind to wander maudlin, because Scott was laughing, hiking up Stiles’ shirt suddenly to expose the shallow arc of words that graced his side, near his hip and following the curve of his body. He made a wordless noise of protest, raising his hands a little to indicate how egregiously Scott was inconveniencing him.

The woman leaned in, curiosity overwhelming her shock that Stiles was in  _no ways_  a  _her_ , and read the words with a baffled distance to her voice. “But why are you peeing on it?”

Silence reigned for a second as the blonde straightened. All eyes turned to Stiles, including Scott’s—although that deep chocolate gaze was the only one that held any amusement—as they waited for a response, for a justification for his strange Soulmark. He’d been here a hundred times before.

So he let the silence stretch, taking a healthy swig from the pilfered Corona. He shrugged, letting his shoulders drop suddenly, and then Stiles lifted his chin a little, as if his explanation was the most reasonable thing in the world. “Hey, it was a sandbox. I was trying to give him a moat.”

Few people ever appreciated that joke, but the sound of Scott’s laugh, every time, made the whole conversation worth it.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Major Character Death

He thinks maybe he knows what it felt like, now, to be Stiles in the middle of the Nogitsune’s wrath. He thinks, finally, he can commiserate on a point he never wanted any practical experience on. He knows what it’s like to be trapped in his own body without any control over what it does.

He knows because it’s happening.  _Right now_ , it’s happening.

It’s like drowning, but drowning slowly, trickle by trickle, his healing factor kicking in again and again to try and give him enough strength to pull his head above the water. And he’s trying,  _oh_ , is he trying, struggling with every ounce of courage and power he has, but it isn’t enough. There’s still the bear, bigger and older and stronger than even his wolf, leaning down on him with its heavy limbs and its stinking breath. There’s still that terrible animal noise that it’s making with his throat and his lungs.

He can smell them, his pack, he can hear their heartbeats thunder a symphony out of time with each other as they approach. He wants to roar, he wants to scare them off, to tell them to run and run far away and hide before the bear can sink its claws into them. He wants to call to his pack, he wants to do  _anything_  but feel his body move forward with a predatory purpose that’s more force than grace. He isn’t the one telling his fingers to clench and unclench under the bones and claws that had been bound to his body, but they’re doing it anyway. The sound of keratin sliding against keratin should be setting his hair on end but his body doesn’t seem to be bothered with it. His body doesn’t seem to be bothered with him at all.

The bear has a sense of humor, in a morbid, malicious sort of way. It hones in on that one heartbeat amongst all the others that beats the hardest and the strongest, the one that belongs to a scared, determined teenaged boy with no protection against these terrible creatures in the night but his own fallible mind. It ignores the werewolves and the guns and the smoke and fire and Scott’s screaming in the cage of his own chest and narrows its attention on Stiles, battering him to the side with an initial blow that splits his face open along the cheek and sends him sprawling.

It’s all he can do to restrain his own limbs, to exert all of his will and his might into sinking his wolf’s teeth into his own tendons and turning each killing blow into something that only bruises and doesn’t break. Stiles bruises so easily.

By the time Stiles is pinned against the wall by a body’s weight and supernatural strength, he’s bleeding from the mouth and Scott isn’t sure whether or not that’s blood he coughed up from somewhere in the pit of him. This is the end, it feels like the end, edged in hysteria, and Scott knows it, but something still snaps into place when Stiles’ frantic wide eyes bore into the socket in the skull and make contact with Scott’s own.

 _Stiles_  makes contact with  _Scott_.

Scott can’t manage anything more than the restraint not to kill Stiles and the slithering sound of his name as it rasps out of his throat.

He can see the boy pale in already-pale skin, he can’t feel the hand that comes up to skip its fingertips along the top ridge of the bear skull, but he knows it’s there. He can feel Stiles’ pain and fear and sudden despair, made manifest in the way his Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows around his voice. “S-scott? Oh, no, no,  _no_ , no, that  _bitch_ , no, no, Scott,  _no_.”

“Stiles…” Scott repeats, forcing the word out past the bear’s teeth. He can’t say anything else, but Stiles reads his intention in his eyes. _Stiles, you have to end this. You have to kill me._

“No,” Stiles repeats, head shaking,  _body_  shaking, eyes suddenly watery. Some of the blood vessels in his left one have burst and Scott is pretty sure that means some kind of brain trauma he doesn’t want to consider. “No, Scott. I can’t. I can’t. There has to be a way to save you. Come on, you can’t…you can’t ask me…”

It’s almost funny, not that Scott has any ability to laugh right now, the way the tables have turned. He understands what it’s like to stand with the katana pressed against his own skin. He understands the resolve, he understands the desperation that is knowing he can’t do it alone. He knows he can’t ask this of Stiles, and he knows he has to, just like how Stiles asked him when their situations were reversed. The bear growls, low and deep, the sound vibrating through the delicate bones of Stiles’ body.  _You have to. You have to do it. I’m losing control in here._

The sob that Stiles makes breaks Scott’s heart. There’s a faint scraping sound as Stiles lets his hand drop from the bear skull, nails scratching at the surface listlessly. He works his mouth a few times around his anguish, swallowing it down, blinking his eyes until his cheeks are a smeared mess of blood, dirt and tears. “I love you, Scott. I love you so much. You—you know that, right? You have to know. I love you. I love you.”

 _I know_.

Then there’s pain, blinding white-hot pain in under his ribs, the first thing Scott has felt in his own body in hours. The bear glances down and Scott glances with him, to the place where the bone armor ends and his abdomen has been left exposed. Stiles’ hands are still wrapped around the handle of a berserker blade that he probably took off of the armor surrounding Scott somehow. He’s shoved it in to the hilt, hands trembling like he could push it any further in, and angled it upwards, driving it in behind Scott’s ribs and coming perilously close to spearing Scott’s heart in the process. It’s missed the organ, and that might have been enough for Scott to survive, but he can see even through his blurring vision that Stiles has been too smart for that. Stiles is always too smart for that. There’s wolfsbane wrapped around the blade, protruding from his body. He can feel the way it burns inside him and Scott knows it won’t be long before the poison reaches his heart, because clever, clever Stiles put it very close.

It makes the bear go crazy. Scott can feel that his body is growing weak, but the berserker spirit that’s been pressing him down like an anvil lashes out. Its last act of rage is to lash out with the claws of one hand and tear them across Stiles’ chest and neck. There’s a wet gurgling noise and Stiles’ hands leap to his throat, insufficient dams for the sudden flood of red.

 _No_. No. It couldn’t end like this, not for Stiles. Scott feels like he’s dissolving into smoke, but he presses forward, hands coming up to brace Stiles’ crumpling body. He forces his own fangs to descend, ignoring the pain and the bubbles of black tar that are climbing up the back of his throat. He crashes the bear skull into Stiles’ shoulder, forcing it to tip up and back and expose Scott’s own face, and there’s one second, one split, shattered second where he makes eye contact with Stiles once again. He can see the word on Stiles’ lips, he knows it, he understands it even if the roaring in his ears makes it impossible to hear it, and for the first time, this last time, Scott ignores it. He opens his mouth and sinks his fangs deep into the hook of Stiles’ neck, just above the collar of his shirt. Scott’s mouth fills with blood and then it overflows.

The last thing he ever sees is Stiles’ face, contorted in an anguished howl, as the boy’s whiskey eyes bleed red, red, red,  _so crimson red_.


	9. Chapter 9

Daylight hit Scott between the eyes like a hammer, righteous and merciless. Pain blossomed in its wake, and he groaned, reaching up to rub at the top of his nose in the hopes of finding some kind of relief. It didn’t serve to do much but spread the pain around to other parts of his skull. His only real option was to close his eyes, wait, and hope that his healing ability would get the message about the splitting headache.

Bit by bit, as he grew more accustomed to the throbbing in his head, Scott became aware of the reports of his other senses. The scents of the room split evenly between achingly familiar and wholly alien; himself, Stiles, sweat and grime, fabric softeners and atmospheric elements he wasn’t accustomed to. The bed he lay sprawled on wasn’t his own, the sheets smelled  _generic_ , not  _sterile_ but like many people at once, underneath the abstract cleanliness. He drew his eyebrows together and groaned.

“Morning, sunshine.”

That was Stiles. Scott would know his voice in the middle of a hurricane, beneath the bottom of a tsunami, with cotton in his ears. A little more focus, and Scott could hear the steady motor of Stiles’ heart to go with the dry amusement in his tone, and the alpha found himself breathing out a faintly relaxed breath. It couldn’t be that bad if Stiles was with him.

Against his better judgment and the preferences of his aching head, Scott opened his eyes.

As it turned out, they were in nothing more sinister than a hotel room, sunlight filtering in through the curtains and one rumpled queen sized bed—the same bed Scott was sprawled out on—dominating the space in the room. Stiles was seated on the end of it, cross-legged, with a plate in his lap that must have come from room service if it hadn’t been stolen from some buffet downstairs. There were croissants. There was also something just faintly  _off_  about the entire situation, not encapsulated by the raise of Stiles’ eyebrows or the chipmunk pouch of breakfast foods he’d made out of one of his cheeks.

The question bore nothing but asking. “Where are we, and why are you wearing my clothes?”

Stiles laughed, looking down at his plate before selecting one of the croissants to offer it in Scott’s direction. Scott had to lever himself up into a sitting position to accept it and almost immediately regretted it. It made his head swim, and somehow the act of his head trying to keep itself above water made it much easier for him to take note of how judiciously the borrowed henley outlined the shape of Stiles’ body, more muscular and streamlined than it had been when they were younger. Stiles looked  _good_ , demarked in a dusky green, and the strength of that realization struck Scott between the eyes like the aftershock of the headache even as Stiles started to speak. To explain. “Well, the  _where_  is pretty straightforward. We’re in the Mirage in Las Vegas. The hotel room you agreed you’d split with me to keep the costs down for Derek’s sake. None of which  _you_  can remember because you drank Deaton’s special brew like it was water last night. Welcome to your teenaged right of passage: your first and possibly only hangover.” Stiles’ eyes went back to his breakfast, attitude smug in a way that could only mean he wasn’t hung over.

“Okay, so…that doesn’t explain the clothes thing.” Scott frowned, murky memories trying to bubble up out of the ooze of his mind. Derek…Derek and Braeden. Derek and Braeden. That’s why they had been here. Cora had flown in from Brasil or wherever it had been she’d been hiding out to stand with her brother because she wasn’t going to let some tradition like best “man” get in her way.

Gesturing grandiosely with half of a cantaloupe slice, Stiles glanced at Scott before looking away at nothing in particular, in that way he often did. “Well, my first change of clothes is a rented tux currently hanging in the closet which I am not putting on again for neither hell nor high water because I do  _not_  want to have to pay the fee for fucking that up. My  _second_  change of clothes got soaked through when Derek tossed me bodily into the pool and is currently in the  _bathroom_  drying, along with my phone which, frankly, might not ever be the same. The  _third_  and  _final_  set of clothes—”

Here, Stiles’ eyes stuttered back to look at Scott, and Scott could recognize the expression that was forming, mouth pulled in against itself, eyes pinched. It was Stiles’ tell, the expression he  _always_  made when he wasn’t absolutely confident of how the other person was going to react to what he was saying. “—you kind of killed to death with your  _true alpha_  claws last night and they are not exactly going to do me any good looking like they went through a document shredder.”

Something stirred at the back of Scott’s mind, and he sat a little straighter, his own eyes narrowing. “Wait,  _I_  ruined them? What was—”

That was about the time that the memories came back in pulses of light, images and sensations and scents that didn’t necessarily fit together but layered in over each other anyway to make a patchwork construct of the previous evening. Scott, flushed with drunkenness and good nature—a friendly drunk, a  _handsy_ drunk—as he leaned on Stiles and relied on his friend to steer him back to their hotel room. His lips on Stiles’ ear and then just behind it and Stiles groaning in response, the sound something like surrender and somehow delicious even in memory. Clever fingers on his body, prying feeling from it he’d thought had died with a girl with the heart of a lioness. Stiles suspended above him and sinking, eyes closed and mouth open, their bodies flush and their bodies flushed and everything,  _everything…_

“ _Oh.”_  Scott said lamely, shaking his head to try and clear it. That was a mistake. He tried a second time by breaking off a piece of the croissant and putting it in his mouth.

“ _Yeah_ .” Stiles was agreeing, voice a little more grave than entirely necessary. “So  _that_  happened last night, and you were unkind to my wrapping when you _unwrapped_  me, so, uh. I stole your shirt. And your pants. My underwear, though, that still kind of felt like a line. I only did it to go down to the breakfast line, man, I’ll wear my own stuff as soon as it’s dry.”

It all seemed like way too much to process at once. Scott rubbed at his temple with one hand, still frowning. “…wait, so why don’t you seem nearly as hung over as I am?”

Boney shoulders on the other end of the bed lifted and then dropped with equal lack of concern. “As it turns out, wolfsbane-laced alcohol that’s strong enough to knock a true alpha on his ass will  _kill_ a measly mortal like me, so mostly I avoided the open bar. But hey, I brought you breakfast, this plate nonwithstanding. I brought  _meat_ .” Stiles nodded towards the table in the corner, near the window, where in fact there was a plate waiting with syrup-slathered sausage, a variety of fruits and a shortstack of pancakes. Scott could already feel the drool start developing in the back of his mouth.

He leaned forward, stretching out the muscles of his back as he did and slowly coming to the conclusion that he was naked under the sheets of the bed. Scott couldn’t really bring himself to feel ashamed. After all, it was  _Stiles_ , and if his memory served him even the least bit right under the cotton stuffing he’d hidden it beneath, Stiles had seen a hell of a lot more last night than he was seeing now. “Do you wanna talk about it…”

“Nope.” Stiles spats the word out like a bullet, still considering his own fruit, and Scott felt it pass through the space in his chest and nick something vital on the way through. His brows furrowed again, unhappiness swelling up to take the shape of words in his throat, but as he always did, Stiles swept in at the last minute and turned it all on his head. “I want you to eat up and get your strength back, wolf boy. Then we’re gonna see how it goes when we’re both sober, because there’s no reason to talk about our  _feelings_  because our  _feelings_  aren’t any different than they were last week and you and I both know it. We’ve had ample and unique opportunities to prove exactly how far we’d go for each other, and that was before any dick-touching was involved,  _so_ , unless you think it’s a terrible idea—you’re gonna eat breakfast and then  _I_  am gonna test all the things about the male anatomy I just spent the morning researching on the pathetically slow hotel internet.” Stiles turned his head then, sunlight shot through his irises until they almost seemed to glow, his gaze intense. Scott could sense that there was something fragile in that gaze, the confidence that Stiles was displaying mostly bravado to cover his nervousness. Scott could ruin the whole card castle with one word. The pressure of it pressed in from both temples.

Still, he found himself smiling, lurching to the side so he could roll off of the bed and start towards the table. “That sounds like a great plan to me, Stiles.”

There was no name for the intensity of the smile he got in return.


End file.
